


Loving You (Loving Me)

by anstaar



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Comment Fic, F/M, Multi, post infinite crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:34:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22323403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anstaar/pseuds/anstaar
Summary: for the prompt: Bart/Cassie/Kon, ‘you’re…back’
Relationships: Bart Allen/Kon-El | Conner Kent/Cassie Sandsmark
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	Loving You (Loving Me)

_It starts like this_

Cassie finds him after the memorial service. The crowd is drifting away. He stands still, hands locked together behind his back, eyes unfocused. It feels wrong. She’s never seen him so still. Impulse or Kid Flash or just Bart, he was always moving. There’s no slight blur to his features or words in his too deep voice. 

(Maybe it’s just easier to confront someone else’s problems than try to face the gaping emptiness that lurks beneath because Wonder Woman is gone, Kon’s _dead_ , and the world’s changed and if she lets herself stop then she’ll change too, and she’s isn’t quite sure what’d come out)

She touches his shoulder. 

_It goes like this_

“The Flash,” she says, not quite a question, not quite hope, and Bart grins. It’s one of his Impulse-wide smiles but it doesn’t make him look like a kid. The expression fits his narrower face and there’s a new glint in his strange yellow eyes.

“Busy competing for the world’s happiest stay-at-home dad award,” he assures her. She doesn’t ask about anyone else. Neither of them wants to talk about the dead. 

Later, she stops by his apartment. Not that you could really call it ‘his.’ He’d been given one of the safe house apartments for dislocated heroes. It was then she realized how little he had. He greets her in a ragged shirt and boxers and it doesn’t take a detective to realize that’s all he has (another change: old (young) Bart never would have blushed at her seeing him without pants). He doesn’t have many people left and most of them are hurting. 

It’s easy to take charge. She goes with him to Oracle to help set up his new papers, firmly rejecting his protests when she gets him into college and then, just as firmly, drags him apartment hunting. She’s had practice, nowadays she doesn’t go home very often. 

“I miss him,” Bart says. They’re sitting at his kitchen table, flipping through his portfolio. Cassie’s hand freezes above the sketch of a field of wheat. They haven’t talked about him. Not since Derek Mathers. They don’t need to say anything. 

It changes like this

Cassie’s dress sparkles in the light; in the dark it contains galaxies. Bart’s tie is undone but his suit fits. She holds out a hand, he follows her lead.

They get an apartment together near the university (they’ve gotten good at apartment hunting together). Cassie takes an archeology course and Wonder Girl patrols between shifts at the café. Bart takes art history and anthropology and civics and, obnoxiously enough, still has plenty of time to spend sketching in the park between the Flash’s duties. 

The newspapers are full of articles about the reformation of the Justice League and Cassie realizes it’s been a year. She comes home to find Bart sitting at the kitchen table, pencil in hand. The paper’s blank. She wraps an arm around his shoulders and they stay that way for a long time, in silence. 

(Everyone grows up and Conner hadn’t wanted to be sixteen forever. Bart’s not the kid who never thought and Cassie’s not the girl who never knew who she wanted to be)

She sees the tears in Bart’s grandmother’s eyes and Cassie would comfort her but she’s too full of frozen fury. It isn’t that she’s lost too much; she simply refuses to let fate follow this path, she won’t believe it has to be a tragedy.

Inertia moves fast but Wonder Girl has fought speedsters before and he’s nothing in the face of her rage. He looks like a kid (he looks like Bart), but Cassie isn’t that old, and she doesn’t bother to feel guilt when she slams him into Captain Cold. Bart is on the ground, blood pooling under him. Cassie lets herself go.

“I think I blew my secret identity,” Bart says from the bed, voice raspy. Cassie kisses him.

_It spins like this_

Conner comes back to life a little more than two years after he died. The world has changed in his absence, some bits more than others. There’s a statue of him in front of the Tower. Personally, he thinks it’s a bit creepy. Not that he _minds_ having a statue of himself, but it’s sort of like ‘hey, remember that time when you were dead,’ in bronze. He isn’t really sure he should be here, anyway. _His_ team isn’t inside. The team he had quit. Looking back, the whole thing was kind of embarrassing. Maybe he’s grown a little, if you can grow when you’re dead. 

Conner doesn’t make his visits (or as he calls it in the privacy of his own head, his ‘hey I’m back’ tour) in any particular order. There’s Superman and Kara and the Kents and Robin and then Mia, who actually tries to explain what had been going on, and Starfire and just load of people. After he starts getting things vaguely sorted out (which is _not_ easy as no one seems able, or willing, to give a clear, chronological, descript of events) he just goes with it. 

Conner figures out that Cassie and Bart are together after the fifth time someone avoids going into too much detail about what they were doing before they somehow ended up in space together. Actually, he figures out that they’re together after Cissie tells him, but the awkwardness had been a big hint that something was up. She was also the first person who remembered he had no clue about Bart’s whole alternate reality/ageing thing. It’s still weird to see them. 

Cassie is laughing. She’s beautiful. It hits Conner all over again as he stands watching her (totally not in a creepy way, he isn’t behind a tree or anything; he’s just…standing back a little) descend like a goddess from one of those renaissance paintings except she’s coming out of a spaceship instead of an unrealistically large seashell and she’s wearing way more clothing. She’s still Cassie, just older. It takes a couple of seconds to realize that the man behind her is Bart. 

He can’t really believe it. Bart is a kid in stupid goggles. Conner had almost managed to accept that Bart was a teen in stupid boots. Conner had looked out for Bart. Of course, he’d looked out for all his friends, he looked out for the world, but looking out for Bart sometimes felt a mere half-step from looking _after_ Bart. The man’s wearing civilian clothes. Cassie is too. His hair is brown and fluffs up. His eyes are a yellowy brown that almost looks gold in the light. He’s obviously the one who’d made Cassie laugh. They look like a couple. Conner wants to walk away. Superboy wants to see his friends. 

It’s impossible to tell which one reaches him first (pretty impressive when one has super speed). He finds himself engulfed in a group hug. It feels right.

_It begins like this_

Conner ends up staying in Cassie and Bart’s apartment. It sounds like a really awful idea and he _had_ been the first to say that. He’d been ignored. It almost of made sense if you didn’t think about it. Conner had ended up with the latest group of Titans (following another series of events that suggested he had pretty much totally lost control over his (second) life). He loved the Kents but he’d never been that keen on receiving parental guidance. Still, he hadn’t wanted to live in the Tower, he likes his new teammates but he’s not ready to spend 24/7 in their company. Cassie and Bart live in California. It all sounds so logical and coming from Bart that makes it too strange to put up a good defense. 

The apartment probably should feel a lot less comfortable than it does. Conner had been…gone for two years. His friends had changed. He’s even made some changes of his own. He and Cassie are basically exes, even if they hadn’t exactly ever broken up. But, as it turns out, everything is, almost annoyingly okay. He tries to explain to Cassandra just why it was bad that things weren’t bad but he’s pretty sure she was laughing at him. Which, okay, he probably deserved. 

They fall into a routine, of sorts. Conner finds himself splitting his life into three camps. First, there’s the superhero world. Cassie and Bart are on call with the league (and who’d of thought, all those years ago, dreaming of the big times). They patrol California, but Conner learns that they actually spend a lot of time in various parts of the world. Conner fights with the Titans (both ways that sentence can be interpreted) and trains with them and sometimes just ditches them to hang out with Cassie or Bart or both (his teammates, his friends, have started to smirk when he tells them where he’s going, not that Conner has any clue why). Second, there’s the ‘normal’ social life. Conner Kent fits into the lives of Cassie Sandsmark and Bart Allen surprisingly well, despite his doleful expectations. He audits a couple of classes at the University to have something to do and finds himself enjoying them. They do homework together in the library and hang out with friends who have no idea what they do. 

Third, there’s Conner and Cassie and Bart. Most days, they eat breakfast together (usually in silence after their two combined glares manage to shut Bart up) and dinner (usually cooked by Bart). This part of his life isn’t just the three of them. It’s hanging out with Tim (or, as the case might be, Red Robin), stopping by Cissie and Anita’s place, texting with Greta, talking with Kor’i, bowling with Vic and so much more. This is eating with Cassie’s mother or with various members of Bart’s family or, occasionally, with the Kents (any generation). At the end of the day, though, it’s the three of them. When he turns from the stove (his turn on cooking duty, it’s not going that badly) and Bart kisses him – that feels right too, as Cassie’s arms are already wrapped around them both.

_Everything ends, but not yet_


End file.
